White Horse
May 1, 2012
Author: Alex Adams
Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books (April 17, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1451642997
ISBN-13: 978-145164299
I've been reading a lot of apocolpytic YA novels recently so I was eager for a grown-up version and White Horse seemed to fit the bill.
Realistic scenarios about how the world could truly end, what types of efforts could go into the destruction of humanity. There are no zombies in this book, which was also refreshing. Granted there are people that might seem to take an unusually long time to die, but they're not zombies!
The main character is Zoe and the book starts when she's feeling lost in life, starting to fall in love with her therapist, and the world is ending.
China sent an EMP across the United States, demanding our newly developed technology which controls weather. Instead we sent bad weather and war to them. The rest of the world got involved and during it all a nutso owner of a pharmaceutical company unleashes a cancer virus - a hidden gem of DNA destruction the likes of no one's seen before.
Give us a few months, a year perhaps and 90% of the population is dead through cancer or war. The people that have survived are either immune to the disease, or have survived it with bizarre DNA mutations. If you can't have zombies you have to have something.
Zoe loses her family entirely and decides to follow the therapist who she believes she loves to the other side of the world. There is of course the chance he never made it to his parents home in Greece and it's all an empty dream. Along the journey she has to survive occasional mutants, and more importantly, humans with no sense of humanity left. Zoe is determined to hang on to her humanity, even if it sometimes puts her own life in danger.
The final pages have a fairly unbelievable ending, with some eyebrow lifting twists and turns, but it is a fictional novel and the goal of a good story is to let you get lost in it's pages, regardless of the sensibility of the tale. This story does that.
I hear that it's the first book in a planned three - I will gladly snatch up the other two when they come out.
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Reviewed by Idgie. If you would like to have the Dew review a book, please contact me at dewonthekudzu@gmail.com
